A sequel to the lively recounting of life in an inner-city high school. The original, My Posse Don't Do Homework (1992) is soon to be a major Michekle Pfeiffer motion picture (called Dangerous Minds, it's also due for release in May). That book dealt with Johnson's experiences in a mini-academy set up within an East Palo Alto, Calif., high school. The English teacher's students were hand-picked as children who could make it, given enough attention and encouragement. This volume aims to put the emphasis on young women in the academy, neglected, Johnson feels, both in the first set of tales and in the classroom. She blames herself as well as the system, suggesting that girls are simply overwhelmed in the classroom by boys' noisy demands for attention. Girls whisper, Johnson theorizes simplistically, ``wring their hands in quiet desperation for a few weeks, then disappear.'' She introduces Simoa, who, terrorized into leaving home, finally returns to school pregnant; Tyeisha, whose mother abandoned her; Araceli, an artist, who challenges whether Johnson is truly color-blind. Unfortunately, she doesn't introduce their stories until halfway through the book, and then is often distracted by the noisy demands of the boys in her class. But whether it's about boys or girls, Johnson, an ex-Marine, is also a good storyteller, bringing drama and suspense to tales from her classroom, and total dedication to her students. She gives up her Sundays to take them to concerts, museums, and plays, hugs them, remembers their birthdays, cries for them, and at year's end sees most of them graduate, with many—girls included—headed for college. She too heads back to college—``to get a life,'' as her students have urged her, and a graduate degree in New Mexico. Every student, girl or boy, needs a teacher like this— caring and committed to helping them succeed in school and in life. (26 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13081-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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